The way a city is organized can create less biased citizens

The city you live in might be making you, your family, and your friends subconsciously more racist. Or your city might make you less racist. It depends on how populated, diverse and segregated your city is, according to a new study that brings together the mathematics of cities with the psychology of how individuals develop unconscious racial bias.

The study, published in the latest issue of Natural communications, presents data and a mathematical model of exposure and adaptation in social networks that can help explain why there is more unconscious or implicit racial bias in some cities than in others. The authors hope that communities and local governments can use the results to help create more just and equitable cities.

“What I find most interesting is the implication that there is some systemic racism related to the way people learn and the way cities are organized,” says fellow psychologist Andrew Stier SFI Complexity postdoctoral fellow and lead author of the study.

Cities create dense networks of social interaction between people. Due to interactions with many different people, we must constantly adapt to new situations and learn, explains SFI external professor Luís Bettencourt (University of Chicago), co-leader of the Cities, Scaling and Sustainability project of SFI and co-author of the study.

To see how racial bias emerges from the way American cities are organized, Stier turned to the massive Implicit Association Test (IAT) database. In the popular online test, volunteer participants are given a pair of white or black faces with positive or negative words and are asked to categorize a single face or word. If they are faster to categorize things when White/good are associated, they have a White-good bias and if they are faster to categorize things when Black/good are associated, they have a Black-good bias.

“People may feel that they are not prejudiced, but may unconsciously have a preference for one group or another, as these tests reveal,” says Stier.

Researchers took the average IAT bias scores of approximately 2.7 million individuals in different geographic areas and linked them to racial and population demographic data from the U.S. Census to build a model that accounts for how individuals learn about prejudices through their social networks. They found that when these networks are larger, more diverse, and less segregated in cities, implicit racial biases decrease.

The findings suggest that there are structural reasons why cities help or discourage people from reducing their racial biases. Perhaps the most pronounced reason is the segregation of different racial groups into different neighborhoods. Added to this is the lack of more cosmopolitan public spaces where a wide range of people can experience positive interactions with each other.

In cities where people cannot meet or interact with people and institutions used by other groups, racial bias creates significant barriers to equity. These barriers are associated with disparities in virtually every aspect of life, including medical care, education, employment, policing, mental health outcomes, and physical health, the authors explain.